Jelly and Jack

In the damp late spring of 1985, Jelly picked up the handset of her pink plastic Trimline phone and the dial tone hummed into her ear. She tilted the earpiece slightly away from her and heard the sad buzz of a distant sound seeking a listener. How many times had she fallen asleep after saying goodbye and not managed to get the thing on the cradle? The little lag when he had hung up but she was still on the line, semiconnected, in a weird half-life of the call, followed by the final disconnection click, then silence, and then, if she didn’t hang up, sharp insistent beeps. These were the odd ways in which the phone communicated: urgent beeps to say, “Hang up”; long-belled rings to say, “Answer”; rude blasts of the busy signal to say, “No.” The phone was always telling her things.

She pushed the eleven buttons—the 1, the area code, the number, zeroing in, the nearly infinite combinations ousted—her fingertips not needing to feel the groove of the numbers but feeling it nevertheless. So many distractions, unneeded and unwanted. She had to concentrate to keep the information away. There was a bird outside, trilling at her. It was at least fifteen feet from the closed window, but it still bothered her. It was probably in the Chinese oak in the courtyard. The ring of another person’s phone sounded so hopeful at first, and then it grew lonelier. It lost possibility, until you could almost see the sound in an empty house.

He didn’t have an answering machine. Make a note of that. A distinction. She could let it ring all day. Was that true? Had anyone ever tried it? The plastic handset rubbed against her jaw and her ear. She tilted it away again. If she lay on her side and let it rest on her head, using a hand only for balance, she could talk for hours.

Audio: Dana Spiotta reads.

“Hello?” said a male voice, clearing itself as it spoke, so that the end of the word had a cough pushing through it. Then came another cough. Was this the first time he had spoken today? Or had she woken him up? Talking to someone just roused from sleep offered a special, intimate opportunity. But it carried high risk, also. The woken person could feel startled or vulnerable, and then grow angry as the reality of the call’s interruption reached his conscious mind. It had happened to Jelly once: “Why the fuck are you disturbing my sleep? You have no idea how hard it is for me to fall asleep. And now. Well, now I’m awake for the goddam duration, you bitch.” Even Jelly couldn’t break through a feeling like that. But this man just finished coughing and waited. She closed her eyes and focussed on the white of ease, of calm, of joy. The pure and loving human event of calling a stranger, reaching across the land and into a life.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice sliding easily through the “l”s, to the waiting, hopeful “o.” She always took her time. Nothing made people more impatient than rushing.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Nicole.”

“Nicole? Nicole who? I think you have the wrong number.”

This was a crucial moment.

“Is this Mark Washborn?”

“Uh, no. I mean, Mark. It isn’t. Who is this again?”

“Nicole. I’m a friend of Mark’s. I thought this was his new number.”

“No. That’s weird. I know Mark. I mean, he’s a good friend of mine.”

“Oh, my. How awkward. I am so sorry I disturbed you, uh . . .” She rarely used “uh,” but it was an important wordish sound that introduced a powerful unconscious transaction. Used correctly, not as a habit or a rhythmic tic, it invited the other person to finish the sentence. It was an opening without content, just the pull of syntax and the human need to complete.

“Jack. Jack Cusano.”

“Jack Cusano? Not Jack Cusano the record producer?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Jack Cusano who also composes film scores? You did that gorgeous work on those Robert DeMarco films.”

“That’s right.” He laughed. His laugh cleared out his throat a bit more. She lay back on the pillow, held the phone so that it barely touched her cheek. She imagined her voice going into the transmitter, sound waves being turned into electrical pulses, sent up the wires to the phone lines to a Syracuse switching station, then turned into microwaves speeding across the country with the memory—the imprint—of her exact tone, her high and low frequencies, her elegant modulations, to the switching station in Santa Monica, which sent electric current up the P.C.H. to a Malibu beach house and into Jack’s receiver, undoubtedly a sleek black cordless phone. So fast, too: instantly turned back into a sound wave by the tiny amplifier near his ear. All that way, all those transformations, but no distortions. A miracle of technology. The sound was as clear as speech in a room. She could—amazing—hear the ocean in the background. A gull, the sound of water pulling back from beach. She could almost hear the sun shining through his west-facing windows.

This was another crucial moment. She knew that she could not initiate anything more. She had to wait for him to open it further. She could not get anxious. She crossed her legs at the ankles, pulled her kimono robe over her knees. She was a little cold. She wanted to be in that room with the beach smell and the sun on the windows. She waited, closed her eyes. She heard him cough.

“So how do you know Mark?” he said. He sounded friendly and a bit amused now.

Jelly made an “em” sound in her throat, with a little push through her nose. It sounded thoughtful, vaguely affirmative. She knew that, even if she had to say no at some point, she would say it low and round and long, so that it sounded as if it had a yes in it somehow. Or an up-pitched-down-pitched mmm-mmm, like a hill. The hum took you for a ride, just under the nose with the mouth closed.

Jelly laughed. These men all had “a” girlfriend, meaning several at any time. She never wanted to be one of a number. What Jelly wanted was to be singular. Not even “a friend.” She wanted a category of her own construction. Something they never knew existed.

“No,” she said. “Actually, he talks to me about his writing. He reads me what he’s written that day. I listen and tell him what I think. He says it gives him motivation, knowing that I’ll call, and he has to have something good to read to me.”

“Really?”

“He never told you about me?” she said.

“No, but I don’t listen to everything Mark says. He tends to fill the air with static. At a certain point, it’s just ambient noise.”

She laughed. He laughed. Jelly sat up, stretching her back straight, feeling her spine arrange itself in a line above her hips. She switched the phone to the other ear and relaxed the tension in her neck. She took a breath. So much of this involved waiting, silence, timing.

“So I have to go, Jack. I am so sorry I disturbed you.”

“No. I mean, no problem. I had to get up. I usually don’t sleep this late. But I was working all night on this piece.”

“You probably want to make some coffee and get back to work.”

“Yeah, but not really.”

“Is it for a film score?”

“You know, it isn’t. It’s just a thing I had in my head, and I was playing with it. Using the keyboard. It’ll end up in a film score at some point, I’m guessing.”

“Really? You don’t watch the film and then compose to it?” she said.

“Yeah, I do. But I also import melodies and musical ideas I have. On file, so to speak.”

“Fascinating.”

“So, would you like to hear some of it?”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, wow, I would really love that. Yes, please.”

“O.K., good,” he said. “Hold on.”

Jelly closed her eyes and leaned back again. She called this body-listening. It was when you surrendered to a piece of music or a story. By reclining and closing your eyes, you could respond without tracking your response. Some people started to speak the second the other person stopped talking or playing or singing. They were so excited to render their thoughts into speech that they practically overlapped the person. They spent the whole experience formulating their response, because their response was the only thing they valued. Jelly had a different purpose in listening to anything or anyone. It had something to do with submission, and it had something to do with sympathy. She would lie back and cut off all distraction. The phone was built for this. It had no visual component, no tactile component, no scent wafting, no acid collection in the mouth, no person with a hopeful or embarrassed face to read. Just vibrations, long and short waves, and to clutch at them with your own thoughts was just wrong. A distinct resistance to potential. A lack of love, really. Because what is love, if not listening, as uninflected—as uncontained—as possible.

She took a deep breath, relaxed, and let the music find her.

“So that’s it,” he said, and let out a tight, nervous laugh.

Jelly opened her eyes, expelled a small sigh into the receiver. “It’s wonderful,” she said.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Good,” he said.

“There were these little leaps with each reprise.”

“That’s right,” he said.

Only after she was done listening did she form her response. And it worked like this: you found the words—out of a million possible words—that truly described the experience. That part, the search for the right language, was fun, almost like solving a puzzle. You thought of the word, and then you felt it in your mouth, pushed breath into it, and said it out loud. The sound of it contained the meaning—she had to hear the words to know if she had it right. Then, as it hung there, she revised it, re-attacked it, applied more words to it.

“It gave me a remarkable feeling of lifting. Not being picked up or climbing. Not even like rising in an elevator,” she said. “Or an escalator. Not quite. More float in it. Maybe like . . . levitating.”

“You levitated while listening to my little piece. Right on.”

It did feel like levitation. Waves of sound. Waves on the ocean. Floating on the water. Floating on sound waves. Levitation. What Jack didn’t know was how easily this came to her.

“I have to go, Jack. I’m afraid I’m late.”

“Oh, no, really?” he said. She heard the hard fizzle of a match strike, and then a sharp intake of breath followed by a blowing sound: lighting a cigarette. She knew the sounds that people made on the phone: the bottle unscrewed or uncorked, the pour of liquid over ice and the cracking of the ice. The sip—so slow it was painful. The delicate, discreet sound of a swallow. And this sound, lighting a cigarette. But with a match, not a lighter. He was a smoker who used matches instead of a lighter, which made him a certain kind of person. Because a match had drama. A match left you with a flame to shake or blow out. And a match left a pleasant phosphorus smell lingering in the air.

“So nice to talk with you this morning. Nice to meet you, Jack,” she said.

“The pleasure, Nicole, is mine. So when can we talk again? Can I call you sometime?”

Jelly sat up. Held the phone back for a minute. She moved slowly in these moments. The giveaway was not his request. The giveaway was that he’d used her name. She had him.

“I do have to run. I promise I’ll call you soon,” she said.

“I look forward to it. Anytime,” Jack said.

“Goodbye,” she said.

“Bye.”

She would not call anytime. She would call on Sunday, at the same time. Only Sunday, and it would only be her calling him. Parameters. Predictability. That was the way it would work best for both of them, for this thing they were building between them. He wouldn’t understand. He would want to call her, to have her number. He would want to talk at other times, more often. But she knew what was best, how to do this. Pace was important. She would make him her Sunday call, and, as the weeks of talks went by, he would accept her terms. He would begin to get great pleasure out of counting the days until Sunday.

“Hey, babe,” Jack said when he answered the phone.

“Hi, Jack,” Jelly said. She was sitting on her couch. She had the trade papers—Variety and The Hollywood Reporter—on the coffee table in front of her. Next to the papers were a large magnifying glass and a highlighter. The rain was coming down hard. Later it would turn into wet, sticky snow. The news called it a “wintry mix.” It would freeze up and make the sidewalks ice sheets by morning. The weather made it difficult for her: if the sun wasn’t out, it was low-lit, low-contrast gray with hidden ice. If she was lucky, she would hear and feel the ice cracking under her feet as she stepped, but mostly it was silent slick surfaces, which made walking frightening. And if the sun came out it was high-glare, every surface a beautiful but painful shimmer of reflected light. The winter was different every day, and you had to plan and react and accommodate it. There were easier places for a low-vision person like her. For anyone, really.

“Congratulations on the Grammy nomination,” she said.

“Thank you. To tell the truth, it doesn’t mean that much. They can barely find five people who qualify in that category. Some of these things, if you submit and your name is known, you’re automatically nominated,” he said.

“But you’ve won before, and surely there’s nothing automatic in that?” Jelly pulled her thick chenille robe around her. She had a cold, and she’d spent the morning sipping tea with lemon and honey. Her throat felt swollen, and even swallowing her saliva caused a sharp pain, but it hadn’t affected her voice yet. She held an ice pack wrapped in a dishtowel. As she listened to Jack, she pressed the cold compress to her throat.

“True,” he said.

“And it’s such a perfectly realized recording. The production is outstanding—anyone would recognize that,” she said. She heard him light a cigarette.

“I watched ‘A Woman Under the Influence’ yesterday,” Jelly said. Jack loved John Cassavetes movies, and he had sent her a private video copy, impossible to find.

“Yeah? What did you think?”

“I think it’s my favorite one. Gena Rowlands is mesmerizing, the way her vulnerability just crushes everyone around her.”

“I never thought of it that way,” he said. “I love that scene where she’s waiting for her kids to get off the bus.”

“Yes, she’s so excited she’s jumping from foot to foot, looking down the street, asking people for the time.”

“Right! I love that. That’s what I’m really like, way too much. When I was working at home and my daughter was little, I used to get so excited when it was three o’clock and she was coming home.”

“You?”

Jack laughed. “Nicole, inside I am Gena Rowlands.”

“I believe it. I’m glad,” she said. She made herself swallow a sip of tea. She felt the movement in her ears. “So how did it go last night?”

“Shitty. I’m not feeling it these days.”

Jack frequently stayed up all night working. ****Jelly called at 2 p.m., about an hour after he got up, by which time he had eaten his eggs and drunk his coffee. Read the Sunday New York Times.

“You always say that, and then you have an amazing breakthrough,” she said. “A few weeks ago you said you felt spent and uninspired, and then you wrote that perfect, haunting melody for the new DeMarco film.”

“That’s true. I mean, I do usually feel shitty about what I’m working on, but that’s no guarantee that the piece will ever get better. And then I complain about it, which must be boring.”

“You feel bad because you care deeply and you’re hard on yourself. Maybe it’s all just part of your process.”

“What?”

“Feeling hopeless makes room for something, maybe,” she said. She heard him exhale.

“You think I need to despair and give up in order to get to something?”

Jelly cooed a sound that concurred with but did not interrupt his thoughts. “Mmm.”

“Maybe.” A long drag on his cigarette. “Maybe I have to push the obvious cliché crap out of my head. I have to exorcise it, throw it all out, and then, when all the bullshit has been heard and rejected, there’s only something new—or, at least, interesting—left.” Jelly heard the ting of a spoon stirring coffee, a sip, and then an exhale. “Maybe that’s true. But it’s a hell of a way to do it.”

“What you are doing works. You always get what you need in the end. Inspiration comes.”

“I really do that, don’t I?” he said. “Never thought of it like that before. But I wonder if I could be more deliberate about it? Know that I’m clearing out the cobwebs, so to speak. Going through the litany of the obvious. The first wave of crap. Maybe I could be more efficient about the process.”

“You could feel confident that, after you’ve rid yourself of it, the real work will start,” she said.

“I’d avoid the feeling of utter despair,” he said. “Just by telling myself a different story about what I was doing.”

“If you can reassure yourself in the midst of it, it won’t cost you so much,” she said. “Because you need—you deserve—the feeling of competence. You know what you’re doing, and your bad moments are just part of a process.”

“Now I feel a little better about working again tonight,” he said.

“Wonderful,” she said.

“You always make me feel better,” he said.

“I hope so,” Jelly said. She pressed the ice to her throat. “Shall I go and let you get back to work? I don’t mind.”

“No!” he said. “Don’t you dare hang up yet.”

“All right,” she said, though she usually didn’t let herself get talked out of her instinct for exit timing. Most Sundays, they talked for an hour, sometimes only half an hour. The times when she was on the line for two or even three hours were unusual but had been more frequent lately. Jack would play music—his or someone else’s—or they would watch a movie together, talking during the breaks in the action. He now regularly sent her VHS cassettes in the mail, along with letters and other little gifts. She had given him her Syracuse address, and if he got the impression that she was a graduate student at Syracuse University it wasn’t from anything she said directly. She left gaps, and Jack filled them in. The contours were a collaboration, built of his desires and her omissions. She didn’t think of these as lies. And she did feel like a graduate student. She was a kind of graduate student in sociology. She had been helped by social workers when she’d really needed help, after a meningitis infection nearly killed her and blinded her overnight. Then, slowly, she had recovered some sight. And now she volunteered to work with blind kids at the Center. Helped their parents. She felt like a grad student in the same way that she felt blond and supple and young when she talked to Jack. She felt elegance in her hands and wrists.

Here is what she did not feel: She did not feel dowdy and heavy. She did not feel the doughy curve of her large belly. She did not feel the flesh of her thighs growing into her knees, making them dimpled and lumpy. She did not feel knots of spider veins or calluses or stretch marks. Was it fair that she hadn’t even had a baby, that mere quick adolescent growth had given her red stripes that had faded to permanent white ridges in the skin of her breasts, her upper arms, and thighs? Did it make sense that, before she had even shown anyone her body, her body had felt old and damaged? She did not feel like a forty-one-year-old woman, did not feel like being this heavy, invisible, unremarkable creature. She felt young and taut, a person who could beguile, a person who loved and understood men. That was the truth, and the rest was not of import to either of them.

“But I have to go soon,” she said.

“No, Nico,” Jack said.

Jelly wanted to hang up while he was still wanting her, long before he’d had his fill. But Jack was hard to resist. She liked the way he called her Nico. The way he asked things of her so openly.

“No? Why not?” she said, her sore throat making her voice crack slightly.

“Because your voice sounds so sultry today, and I need to listen to it,” he said. His naked want worked on her. It skirted toward the sexual, but she never let it go there. She was reserved about overt sexuality, and the men she talked to got that somehow. They knew that some women were butterflies in your hands. You didn’t say crude things to them. You breathed gently and you didn’t make any sudden moves.

However, it was also true that a few men she had called in the past hadn’t got her at all. They didn’t understand her, despite her guidance, her clear vision for them, her parameters. They weren’t interested in her, not truly.

“You are making me so hard,” one unworthy contact had said, apropos of nothing she had told him. This despite her subtle, demure approach, and the fact that she knew someone in his circle. She’d hung up immediately and never called him again.

Jack was polite. He cursed and he hacked his cigarette cough, but he was gentle. A gentleman.

“I don’t have to go yet,” she said. “Are you feeling sad? You sound a little sad.”

“Maybe a little.”

“It isn’t just about your work?”

“I don’t know. It’s a nice Sunday sad, some old-fashioned melancholy. Sometimes I sit around and just feel sad about things. Is that odd? I am odd—you know I am. It isn’t just loneliness. I miss certain people, or feel sad about certain people, which is different, I think.”

“Who?”

“I miss my Uncle Joe. He died a few years back, but I thought of him today. He was a funny guy. He didn’t really understand me or what I do, but that didn’t matter. We were family, and he always liked me and made me feel that. Up until he died, he gave me money every time I saw him. Even though he was a retired insurance salesman and I was making a lot of money, a successful guy, an adult with a kid, when he’d see me at a family dinner or whatever, when he was leaving he’d press a hundred dollars into my hand and say, ‘A little gas money,’ and wink. I’d try to refuse, but it was his way of showing he was looking out for me. An Italian thing, I guess. I miss that little jolt of family.” Jack coughed. “I should have, I don’t know, asked his advice or something, instead of just talking to my cousins. And I miss my dog Mizzie. She was a mutt with these droopy hound eyes and long velvet ears. I got her when I was in my twenties and had her through my first divorce and second marriage. I never walked her as much as she wanted me to. I rushed her or let the housekeeper do it. Now I wish she were here so I could take her for a long walk.”

“Oh, you are being very hard on yourself,” she said.

“Not just that.” She heard him light another cigarette and exhale. “Not just that. I miss my daughter and my mother. I mean, my daughter is still around, but—” He laughed.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

“I don’t know. My spiel of regrets.”

Jelly fingered her tender throat and listened to Jack smoke.

“It’s difficult,” she said. “So difficult.”

“Do you miss anyone, Nico?” he said. “Maybe you’re too young—”

“No, I do,” Jelly said, starting to talk before Jack finished, which was something she tried never to do.

“Yeah? Who?”

“My father died when I was sixteen,” Jelly said. “He never lived with us, so I didn’t see him too often. Once a week he’d take me out. Usually we saw a movie and then went to a diner and had hamburgers. It was hard, because he died suddenly, of a heart attack, and I kept thinking about the last time I saw him. I was in a bad mood, and I didn’t want to go out to dinner with him. I wanted to be with my friends. So I went, but I sulked. I didn’t want to see a movie, and I barely ate my dinner. I remember peeling the label off the Coke bottle and how he kept asking awkward questions about my life. I found everything he said irritating and boring. And then, after he died, I felt bad about that dinner. I remember sitting on my bed and realizing that I could actually count the number of times I had seen my father. One night a week, plus a full week every summer. Multiplied by my age, or at least the years I could remember, so let’s say twelve. That was all we had, and yet I couldn’t be bothered to even look at him the last time I saw him.” This was a true story that she had never told anyone before. Part of her thought, Stop. What are you doing? But she pushed that thought away. Jack would love her; she knew it.

“Oh, no,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But you were a kid. He knew you loved him under the sulk. My daughter did the same thing—all kids do it. I promise you he understood that.”

“Yes,” Jelly said. The word squeezed through her tight throat. She could feel patches of heat on her cheeks and her eyes started to sting.

“I mean, my daughter—I haven’t seen her in months,” he said. He made a loud exhale, half sigh, half noise. “We had a stupid thing a few months ago. We—I mean, I—I should be able to do better, but every day I don’t.” Jelly said nothing, just waited for what he would say or sound next. A sniff. “It’s O.K.,” he said. “It’s good sometimes to feel this way, even if it fucks me up a little.” Jelly could hear that his voice had a catch in it—a failure of breath mid-word—and it undid her. Her own throat caught.

“I know,” she said, and she heard the unmistakable sounds of a man weeping, a man unused to it, and she let him get it all out. She could hear his hard breaths, his sniffs, the little human noises of feeling. “I know.” She did know.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Jack. You’re O.K. with me.”

“Yeah, yeah. I am O.K. with you. I am.”

She felt so close to Jack that she did something she had never done before. She stopped calling other men, her other phone dates. She gave Jack her number and let him call her whenever he felt like it. They began to talk every day. This thing between them was quickly escalating, and she tried not to worry or think about where it would lead. She tried, in her own soft, quiet way, to maintain a little reserve and slow things down. But it was hard, because, well, she was in love with Jack. She felt connected to him in ways that made her happy all the hours of her day.

He trusted her and she trusted him, and when she hung up the phone she felt so loved. But then all at once her life—her real life, her harsh, real life—was all around her. She looked down at her hand holding the phone, at her legs in her robe, at her notebook full of notes about her phone conversations. She squinted up at her apartment, and imagined how she’d look to anyone else. She tried to tell herself that things might work out, but the gap was so big. It made her gasp.

The phone rang very early one morning. Jelly woke in her bed, the room dark. She had fallen asleep talking to Jack but must at some point have returned the phone to its cradle on the nightstand. She reached out from under the covers and picked up the phone. She held it to her ear and, half-asleep, whispered, “Hello?”

“Nico,” Jack said in a low voice.

“Are you O.K.?” she asked, and her voice sounded drowsy and girlish.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you asleep?” Jelly pulled the covers over her head and held the phone to her ear as she closed her eyes.

“A little,” she said, and she sighed into the mattress by the receiver.

Years earlier, when she was in college, she had rented her first apartment, just off campus. She’d been excited to have her own space and her own phone. One night the phone woke her. She was still partially asleep when a man’s voice said, “Hi,” as if he knew her.

“Hi,” she said.

“It’s me,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” she said.

“You sound sleepy.”

“I am a little sleepy,” she said.

“Good,” he said. And then she heard something in his voice. “So good,” he whispered. “And you like it, don’t you?”

“Who is this?” she said, now awake and angry, and he moaned a little into the phone. She heard it, paused for just a moment, and slammed the phone onto the cradle. It wasn’t anyone she knew. He’d just randomly called her, a crank call. He called women in the phone book, probably, and got them to talk to him by acting intimate, by whispering to them while they were disoriented after being woken in the middle of the night. What upset Jelly the most was how he’d sounded—gentle and easy. She replayed the voice in her head, and it wasn’t a deviant voice. It was sexy. He’d never called again, although she almost wished he had. It was the first time she’d understood what the phone could be—a weapon of intimacy.

Jelly closed her eyes and said his name into the receiver: “Jack.” She lay on her stomach with the phone next to her. “I’m in bed.” And she listened to him breathe.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning! How are you?”

There was a long pause. Jelly pulled a velvet pillow onto her lap. She rested her elbows on it, the phone cradle on the pillow between her arms, the receiver held lightly by her ear. The room was bright. It was midmorning. She was still in her silk pajamas. Her kimono robe opened to the morning air. The sun was strong and warmed her face as she spoke. She heard Jack light a cigarette. She resisted the urge to fill in, talk. She waited for him to speak.

“What if I said something crazy?”

Jelly waited some more. But she knew what was coming. It always came.

“What if I bought you a ticket and you got on a plane to come see me?”

She laughed. Not a mocking laugh but a fluttery, delighted laugh. It was a delicate situation. She could feel his want. All down the wires the want travelled. In his scratchy morning voice, his cigarette voice, his sentence didn’t sound like a question until it went up a half-register on the word “me.” It was touching.

Still she didn’t speak. This was the moment she’d been longing for but also dreading. Things always fell apart after this.

“I mean it. I’ve been thinking. I think—well, not thinking. That’s the wrong word. Feeling. I have these feelings for you. I want to be with you.”

“I have feelings for you, too,” she said.

“I’m in love with you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is that crazy? Never meeting in person, and feeling this way.”

After she got off the phone, Jelly began to cry. She let herself feel loved, in love, immersed in their particular devotion, however fleeting. But there was no chance for them, not after what she had done. She had no choice.

The first time Jelly had come to such a pass was with another man she called, Mark Jenks. He was a mildly successful film director. Things had gone on for months; things had gone as far as they could (nothing stays in one place, people always want more), and one day he asked her what she looked like. She described herself accurately but not specifically: long blond hair, fair skin, large brown eyes. Those true facts would fit into a fantasy version of her. She knew, because she had the same fantasy of how she looked. But, after a few weeks of that, there came the request for a photograph.

She had taken some photographs of her friend Lynn. She’d met Lynn through the Center. She was the mother of one of the low-vision kids Jelly worked with. Lynn was lovely to look at: a slender girl with delicate but significant curves. She was not that bright and had a flat, central-New York trailer accent, but she also had a most appealing combination of almost too pouty lips, heavy-lidded eyes, and an innocent spray of freckles across her tiny nose. Lynn had invited her to the beach with her son, Ty, who was six. Jelly met with Ty once a week to help him adjust to his fading eyes. Although she had regained nearly all of her own sight, she still had to use extremely thick glasses; she was tunnel-visioned and had difficulty in low-contrast situations. Like Ty, she didn’t fully belong in either world, sighted or blind. She was like a character in a myth, doomed to wander between two places, belonging nowhere. That was the word, “belong.” How much she would like to be with someone, and be long—not finite, not ending—with someone.

At the beach that day, Lynn had looked even more beautiful than usual. She wore very little makeup. She had a tan and a white macramé bikini. She looked happy, relaxed. Jelly took three shots of her. Just held up her cheap camera and clicked. One showed Lynn looking away, thoughtful. One was blurred. The third showed her smiling into the camera. Lynn looked sexy but not mean. A happy, open, sweet-looking girl. Jelly knew as she took the photos what she would do with them. She dropped the film at the Fotomat to be developed. She made sure she kept the negatives in a safe place.

The photos bought her some time with Mark, but they also escalated things. She knew there was no coming back from the lie. She tried to enjoy the moment, the delicious male desire directed at her. In her fantasies, she often imagined herself looking like Lynn and being worshipped by Mark. She was always Jelly but not Jelly, even as she lay in her bed with the lights out, after Mark had whispered his love for her and she had replaced the phone on the cradle. She closed her eyes and leaned back into her pillow. Her hand found the elastic top of her panties, the curly hair, and then the tiny wet bump. With all the possibilities of the world at her beckon, she never imagined Mark loving Jelly, squishy middle-aged Jelly. She was herself, but in Lynn’s body. She imagined Mark undressing her and touching her perfect, pink-tipped breasts as they spilled out of her bra, her smooth thighs under her skirt, her supple but taut midsection, her round high ass. She watched her fantasy as if it were a movie. After she came, she didn’t think too much about it. Was it unusual to exclude your own body from your fantasy? Why not, if anything is possible, imagine him loving you as you are? Because (and she knew this absolutely, without ever saying it to herself) her desire depended on her perfection in the eyes of the man. The fantasy—and her arousal—was about her perfect body. And how a man like Mark—a man who already loved her in theory—would worship her in that body. Her fantasy was impossible to fulfill, and she was never dumb enough to believe that Mark could love her as she actually was.

After Mark, she had used the photos with two other men. Things always proceeded in the same direction, and when a meeting became unavoidable she ended them.

But what about Jack? Some part of her thought that maybe Jack would love her no matter what. She thought about sending a neck-up flattering photo of herself, just to see what happened. Before he asked for a photo, before he invited her to visit him, he’d asked her the question they’d all asked at some point. Though Jack’s version was artful, gentle: “You sound so young when you laugh. How old are you?”

Jelly laughed again. She knew how to avoid answering questions. But you couldn’t laugh off questions forever. And all his circling around eventually came to the point. What do you look like? It wasn’t that she didn’t expect it or that she didn’t understand it; it was just so hopeless to always wind up against it. And how could she answer it? After she hung up the phone, she sat on the couch for a long time, staring into the faint dusk light.

What do I look like? If you look, or if I look? It is different, right? There is no precision in my looking. It is all heat and blurred edges. Abstractions shaped by emotion—that is looking. But he wants an answer.

What do I look like? I look like a jelly doughnut.

Jelly got up and went to the mirror. What to do if what you look like is not who you are? If it doesn’t match?

I am not this, this woman. And I am not Lynn-in-the-photograph. Jack must know. Jack knows who I am. I am a window. I am a wish. I am a whisper. I am a jelly doughnut. Sometimes, when my hair falls against my neck and my voice vibrates in my throat, I feel beautiful. When I am on the telephone, I am beautiful.

How would it go? Jelly knew, just as she knew so many things without having experienced them. She knew that if she met Jack he would be disappointed, even if she were beautiful in the common sense of “beautiful.” “Common” was an interesting word. It could be comforting if you meant what we all have in common. But it also meant ordinary—something we’ve all seen many times or can find easily. So a common beauty was agreed upon by all and also dull, in a way.

Still, his disappointment would come out of something human and inescapable: the failure of the actual to meet the contours of the imaginary. As he listened to her words come across the line and into his ear, he imagined a mouth saying them. As he spoke into the receiver, he imagined a face listening, and an expression on that face. Maybe he imagined a woman made up of an actress he’d seen on TV the night before, plus a barely remembered photograph of his mother when she was very young, and a girl with long hair he’d once glimpsed at the beach. But there was no talking without imagining. And, when imagining preceded the actual, there was no escaping disappointment, was there?

What about Jelly? Would Jelly feel disappointment with Jack if he showed up sweaty, old, smelling of breath mints and cigarettes? It never occurred to her to think this way. She would be so focussed on him that her own feelings wouldn’t matter. She would feel disappointed if he felt disappointed. She would hear it in his voice, and she would know that she was losing everything, all the perfect, exquisite moments that she had made with him.

“I want to see you,” Jack had said. “I need to see you.”

“I know. I know. O.K.,” Jelly had said. “I will send you some pictures.”

Of course she was right to send the photographs of Lynn; she needed to make things last just a little longer. But she cried as she sealed the envelope, because for a moment she thought it might have gone a different way. ♦